Time for a culture of civility in America

Arturo Gallardo - Express-News

Published 12:00 am, Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Recently, I've found myself thinking often about my late grandfather; a man of strong character who spent many hours sharing colorful anecdotes involving mining, mechanics and life in western Coahuila.

The old man was a devout Catholic with defined beliefs concerning a number of issues and always enjoyed a spirited conversation. After many years of practice, he learned to remain civil and calm during heated discussions.

Probably, his great efforts in civility — shown in the last few years of his life — constitute the main reason for his increased presence in my thoughts lately. Would we spend hours debating immigration? What would be his opinion about Facebook? In any case, he would have surely shown respect for my positions, even when disagreeing with them entirely. This type of restraint has become scarce in the United States.

The last few years of partisan politics, now combined with stubborn unemployment, are taking an evident toll on our capacity for civilized discussion and tolerance across American society. But the intolerance and anger seem to have deeper roots than just some disenchantment with Washington, the current immigration debate or even the direct hit to our wallets.

I wonder if we could be experiencing some growing pains as a result of living in a dynamic and complex world, which renders previous social paradigms obsolete.

However, observing the maturity of social media helps in providing context to the process of globalization in this horizontal world. Today, Twitter and Facebook present great opportunities for interaction. Politics, culture and even sports — just to mention a few subjects — can be tackled quickly and with an amazing diversity of perspectives.

Then, civility and tolerance become essential for constructive dialog, but in this age of 140 characters or less it is extremely easy to offend hundreds, maybe thousands — maybe more. Unfortunately, building constructive dialog that involves controversial issues such as immigration reform in this country is a more complicated endeavor.

Even the media can make terrible mistakes in mundane topics, like basketball. We learned last week about the firing of a Dallas radio personality who posted a racist slur aimed at San Antonio after game 4 of the Spurs-Mavericks playoff series. It was truly a sad occurrence that racism and intolerance surfaced.

The variety of serious issues that usually provoke visceral reactions and declarations is vast and present in our every day lives. But whether we hate paying taxes or believe that health care should be a basic right, we share this diverse American society and it would be tremendously more productive to defend our ideas in a civil manner.

The enormous diversity of ideas is one of America's great assets, and everyone has the right to be passionate about personal opinions. However, embracing one another and learning different perspectives should be fundamental to find pragmatic solutions to our modern challenges — my grandfather would have understood, even if he disagreed.